The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  Jesus, I thought, if this was how I felt, how must Fergus be reacting, if I was right, and he was guilty? Now would be the time to watch him, study him. But I could barely have walked just then, let alone drive back to the castle, even if I had been able to summon up the courage to return.

  Eventually I felt better again, and instead of going into the house, went for a walk through the woods and the forest and up into the hills, and sat on an old ruined wall on the hill topped by the cairn where dad had told us about the mythosaurs, all those years ago. I looked down to the trees and the loch in the pastel light cast by the bright, gauzy overcast, while the mild wind freshened. I replayed that scene in the castle library time after time after time, imagining that I remembered every word, every movement, every nuance of tone and phrasing, every millimetric increment of body language, trying to work out whether I was being terribly sensitive and acute, or just insanely fanciful and paranoid.

  Sometimes I thought it was perfectly obvious that Fergus was utterly genuine, and all my ideas, all my suspicions were demonstrably ludicrous. Of course the man was innocent; I was insane. Guilty as charged, indeed; who was I to judge?

  Other times it was as though his every inflection and gesture shrieked artifice, lies, deception. Very good deception, cunningly deployed lies and artful artifice, but everything false all the same.

  He had reacted just as you would expect somebody to react. But was that the way somebody actually would react? I didn't know, and could not decide.

  I got so angry and confused at it all I threw my head back and screamed at the grey sky, roaring full force, all noise and no meaning till my lungs emptied and my throat ached. I doubled up, coughing and spluttering, eyes watering, feeling marginally better but looking round guiltily, hoping nobody had heard or seen. Only a couple of crows answered, harsh voices calling from the trees beneath.

  I'd chosen a vantage point from which I could watch the road and the house, and only went back down there when I saw mum's Metro turn off the loch road from Gallanach and flicker like a green ghost as it moved up the drive, half-obscured by the trunks and branches of the bare, grey oaks.

  * * *

  I suppose I was uncommunicative with James and my mother that evening; I spent most of the time in dad's study, reading and rereading the three pieces Rory had written about himself, Fergus, Aunt Fiona and Lachlan Watt. I looked through some of Rory's diaries, gritting my teeth at the impenetrable paucity of their desiccated information. I turned on the Compaq and looked at the letter I'd written that morning. Damn; found a spelling mistake that had got through the spell-checker; «saw» where I'd meant to type "was'.

  I started drinking whisky after dinner, sitting at the desk in the study at first, craning over its leather surface, sifting through the various papers and diaries, my eyes getting sore. I nearly spilled my whisky into the Compaq at one point, so I turned off the little green-shaded light on the desk and went over to the couch, taking all the bits and pieces with me. I switched on the standard lamp behind me and lay lengthwise on the couch, surrounded by paper. I had the TV on with the sound turned down most of the time, using the remote to turn it up whenever it looked like there was something interesting coming in from the Gulf. I heard James go to bed about eleven-thirty. Mum looked in to say good-night about twelve. I waved, wished her pleasant dreams and kept on reading.

  I woke up just after two with the whisky glass balanced on my chest and my eyes feeling gritty. I finished the whisky even though I didn't really feel like it, then went to bed. I drank some water before I fell asleep.

  * * *

  The clock said 4:14 when I woke up, my bladder just at that point where it might or might not be possible to fall asleep again without having to go for a pee (it didn't usually wake me with so poor an excuse). I lay there for a bit, listening to soft rain hitting the bedroom window. Maybe that was what had woken me. I turned over to go to sleep again, then suddenly started to wonder if I'd turned the computer off. I had the feeling that I had, but 1 couldn't actually remember doing so. Fuck it, I thought; it would be safe enough. I rolled over onto my other side.

  But my bladder had woken up properly in the meantime and was demanding attention. I sighed, swung out of bed, not bothering with my dressing gown even though the house had grown a little chilly by now. There was an orange night-light plug in a socket in the corridor; I decided to save my eyes from the shock of putting on any more powerful illumination and navigated the anyway familiar route to the bathroom by the plug's pale orange glow.

  I sat in the darkness, peeing. A sort of quarter-erection had made it advisable to sit down. I smiled, remembering Lewis's spiel about trying to pee when you had a full bladder and a full erection at the same time. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands and drank some water from the tap. Mum must have been varnishing some part of the harpsichord earlier, judging by the smell in the corridor. I padded along to the study.

  could just make out the dim shape of the desk and computer on the far side of the room when I opened the study door. I couldn't hear the Compaq's fan running, or see a light on, but I went over to it anyway. I stood with my thighs against the wood and leather back of the desk's chair, and leant forward, pressing the computer's disk eject button in case I had switched it off but had left a disk in it. No disk. I yawned, straightened, and rubbed the inside of my right fore-arm where it had brushed against the glass shade of the little desk light. The shade had been hot.

  There was a little red dot glowing on the dark screen of the computer monitor; must be the reflection of the TV on the other side of the room. Ha; so I had left it -

  I froze, suddenly wide awake.

  Why was the light shade hot?

  The little red light reflected on the screen winked out, as though suddenly obscured.

  I threw myself back from the desk, just starting to sense movement behind me; I fell backwards as something dark scythed past in front of my face and a noise like the wind terminated in a splintering crash. Somebody — just a silhouette in the dim vague shadows of the room, lit only by the feeble light spilling from the hall night-light — stumbled forward, just behind where I had stood, arms reaching in front of them, pulling something long and dark and thin out of the wrecked back of the seat. The figure started to turn as I landed heavily on my back on the rug; I kicked out at their nearest knee, wishing I was wearing my Docs. Or anything, come to that.

  I felt my heel hit their leg. "Huh!"

  Sounded male; he staggered a little, then came forward at me, one arm raised as I started to roll, suddenly feeling very vulnerable and naked. A smashing noise sounded from overhead; metal and glass. I kept rolling, pushing up with my hands and leaping to my feet. Glass was falling from the ceiling as something thudded into the floor where I'd lain. I was at the man's side as he staggered forward, raising the bar or jemmy or whatever the hell it was from where it had struck the carpet. I kicked him in what I hoped was the kidneys and watched him stumble to one side, then something banged into the top of my head and hit my shoulder, contusing me. My feet crunched over something hard on the rug as I staggered. More light from the hall, as I stood swaying, dazed, and the attacker recovered. I could see him better now; all in black. Gloves, balaclava. His build…

  "Uncle Ferg?" I heard somebody whisper. It sounded like me.

  "Prentice?" said a woman's voice, distantly, worriedly, from the corridor.

  I watched the man in front of me seem to hesitate, arm raised. I was falling. I staggered backwards, trying not to fall, crashing into a filing cabinet.

  "Prentice!" mum screamed, somewhere. Then; "James! Get back!"

  The dark figure looked towards the hallway, where the light was. I nearly fell round the side of the filing cabinet, then pulled myself up on some shelves, staring back at the black-dressed man in the middle of the room. There was movement at the study door; sparks flashed in the middle of the ceiling. I clutched at something on the bookshelf; graspable, heavy enough; an ashtray or bowl. I threw it, h
eard it hit his body and clunk to the floor. He still stood there, maybe only for a second or so, but it seemed like an eternal hesitation, while he glanced from me to the hallway again. I thought I heard a door slam. I roared, shouting incoherently the way I had on the hillside that afternoon as I stumbled from the shelves, past the filing cabinet and nearly fell over the desk while he came forward at me, arm raised again; I picked up the computer's keyboard from the desk, hauling it bursting free and swinging it as hard as I could at him as he brought his arm down.

  There was a terrific, bone-ringing crash that seemed to infect the whole world, like an electric shock and a thunder-clap and an earthquake all at once. There was an odd pattering and clinking noise from every part of the room. I stood, holding nothing, blinking in the darkness while somebody moved stumbling away, obscuring light.

  I felt weird. My feet and arms and head felt buzzy and sore, but when I felt my head I couldn't feel any blood. Feet felt slippy. I heard the phone on the desk make a noise, and picked it up, still dazed.

  "Which service?" said a man's voice.

  "Police!" I heard my mother shout.

  "Sorry," I mumbled. I put the phone down, pushing myself away from the desk. I tripped on the pale remains of the keyboard. Its lettered keys lay scattered about the floor like teeth. I stubbed my toe on something, bent down and picked up a long steel bar. I limped to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door slam shut.

  My head felt buzzy again; I went into the kitchen, found the broken door lock and two full red plastic petrol cans sitting on the kitchen table, then got back out into the hall, still holding the steel bar even though it was beginning to feel very heavy, and shouted, "Mum? Mum; it's all right! I think… " before I had to sit down at the kitchen table, because my tongue had suddenly become a clapper in the bell of my skull, and my head was ringing. I put my arms on the table and rested my head on them while I waited for the echoes in my head to go away.

  "Welcome to Argyll," I told myself.

  The kitchen light was painfully bright when it went on. Mum brought me my dressing gown and put a blanket over my shoulders and made me drink heavily sugared tea, and I remember thinking, Sugared tea; dad must have died again, and mumbling something about having a flag in my foot when mum washed them and put bandages on them, and wondering why she was looking so upset and James so frightened; then police came. They seemed very large and official and asked me lots of questions. Later, Doctor Fyfe appeared looking slightly dishevelled, and I recall asking him what he was doing up at this time in the morning, and how he was these days. Old ticker holding out all right, was it?

  CHAPTER 18

  We were on the battlements; I faced into the cool north wind. I waited to feel the dizziness of déjà vu, but didn't. Maybe too much had happened, or not enough time had passed.

  * * *

  "Well, whatever the heathen equivalent is," Lewis said. "Will you?"

  "Of course," I said. I looked down into the small pink face bundled inside the old family shawl; Kenneth McHoan had his eyes tightly closed and wore an expression of concentration on his features that implied sleep was a business of some deliberation. One of his hands — the thumb so small it could have fitted on just the nail of one of my own thumbs — was held up near his chin; the fingers made a slow waving motion, like a sea anemone in a ray current, and I jiggled up and down a little, cradling the sleeping child and going, "Shh,shh."

  I glanced at Verity, sitting beside Lewis, her arm round his waist. She looked up from her son's face for a moment.

  "Uncle Prentice, the Godfather." She smiled.

  "An offer only a churl could refuse."

  * * *

  "People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice," said Diana Urvill, as she took a Corning turn-of-the-century cut glass plate out of the display case in the castle Solar and — after wiping the plate with a lint-free cloth — handed it carefully to me. We both wore white gloves. I took the plate — like an immense ice crystal with too many angles of symmetry — and placed it on the table, on the topmost sheet of foam. I folded the translucent padding over — thinking how much it looked like prawn crackers — secured it with tape, then found a suitably sized box and placed the plate in the centre, on a bed of small white expanded-polysytrene wafers that looked like flattened infinity symbols.

  I lifted one of the giant sacks of the wafers and filled the box to the brim with them, covering the wrapped-up plate, then closed the box and took the little card Diana had left on the table and taped it to the side of the box where it could be read. Then I put the box on a five-high pile near the door; the stacking limit was six, so it completed that column.

  "Absorption spectra?" I said sceptically, as we started to repeat the whole process with a Fritsche rock crystal ewer.

  Diana, dressed in baseball boots, black tracksuit bottoms and a UCLA sweatshirt, her black hair tied in a pony tail, nodded, and breathed on the ewer before polishing it. Things they get absorbed in. Interests, that sort of thing. If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in — all that sort of stuff — then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed."

  "What an astronomical imagination you have, Diana," I said. "Getting enough oxygen up on Mauna Kea, yeah?" I grinned.

  "Just a pet theory, Prentice." She finished polishing the ewer. "Better than believing in," she said, and handed me the elaborately carved jug, "crystals."

  "Well, that's true, in a very un-Californian way, isn't it?" I filled the inside of the ewer up with little polystyrene beads from another giant sack, a broad smile on my face as I remembered.

  * * *

  She cried out and the crystal sang in reply.

  Later, we exchanged signals.

  * * *

  "Help me fold these sheets, will you?"

  * * *

  The day after all the excitement at Lochgair, I sat at the dining table with what looked like a turban on my head. It was a towel wrapped round one of those sealed liquid containers you freeze and put in cool boxes.

  I signed the statement.

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Davey, stop calling me 'sir', for God's sake," I breathed. Constable David McChrom had been in my class at school and I couldn't bring myself to call him 'officer'. His nickname had been Plooky, but that might have been carrying informality a little too far.

  "Ach, second nature these days, Prent," he said, folding the papers and standing up. He looked depressingly fresh and well-scrubbed; joining the police force seemed to have done wonders for his skin condition. He lifted his cap from the table top, turning to my mother. "Right. That's all for now, Mrs McHoan. I'll be getting back, but if you think of anything else, just tell one of the other officers. We'll be in touch if we hear anything. You all right now, Mrs McHoan?"

  "Fine, thanks, Davey," mum smiled. Dressed in jeans and a thick jumper, she looked a little dark around the eyes, but otherwise okay.

  "Right you are, then. You look after that heid of yours, okay, Prentice?"

  "As though it were my own," I breathed, adjusting my towel.

  Mum saw him out.

  The CID were still in the study, looking for fingerprints. They'd be lucky. I looked out of the dining-room window to where a couple of policemen were searching the bushes near the kitchen door.

  My, we were being well looked after. I doubted a roughly equivalent fracas in one of the poorer council estates would have attracted quite such diligent and comprehensive investigation. But maybe that was just me being cynical.

  My head hurt, my feet hurt, my fingers hurt. All the extremities. Well, save one, thankfully. Most of the damage came from the central light fixture in the study ceiling. It was part of that — a large, heavy, brass part of it — which had hit me on the head, and it was the shattered glass of its shades which had cut my
feet as I'd stumbled around the study. My fingers hurt from the impact of computer keyboard and steel tyre-iron.

  The desk drawers had been levered open. The back of the desk's matching chair had taken the full force of a blow with the tyre-iron, the light fixture had been hit accidentally by the same implement and the ceiling rose damaged, the Compaq's keyboard was wrecked and the kitchen door needed a new lock. I felt I could use a new head.

  Nothing had been stolen, though I'd noticed that all the papers I'd been looking at earlier that night — and which I'd left scattered round the couch — had been neatly gathered together and piled on one end of the desk, under a paperweight. The envelope I'd left in the desk's top right drawer that morning was still here. The police didn't open it. Apart from the damage, and that one contrary act of tidiness, it looked like our attacker had taken nothing, and left behind him only the petrol and the tyre-iron.

  I wanted to phone Fergus; ask him how he was. Good night's sleep? Any aches and pains? But mum had been fussing over me after Doctor Fyfe had said I'd need watching for a day or two and I wasn't being allowed to do very much. Somehow I lacked the will, anyway.

  They'd asked me if I had any idea who it might have been, and I'd said No. I didn't say anything to my mother, or anybody else, either.

  What could I say?

  I was certain it had been Fergus — his build had been right, and even though I'd been dazed, I swear he did hesitate when I spoke his name — but how was I supposed to convince anybody else? I shook my head, then grimaced, because it hurt. I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid, not even thinking that he might try and steal or destroy whatever evidence he thought I had. "Is this something you've read?" I whispered to myself, remembering what Fergus had asked me. "In your father's papers, after his death?"

  Jeez. I felt myself blush at my naïvety.

  Mum continued to fuss, but I got better through the day.